AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence (AI-EDGE)

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Networking and AI are two of the most transformative IT technologies --- helping to better people’s lives, contributing to national economic competitiveness, national security, and national defense. The Institute will exploit the synergies between networking and AI to design the next generation of edge networks (6G and beyond) that are highly efficient, reliable, robust, and secure. A new distributed intelligence plane will be developed to ensure that these networks are self-healing, adaptive, and self-optimized. The future of AI is distributed because AI will increasingly be implemented across a diverse set of edge devices. These intelligent and adaptive networks will in turn unleash the power of collaboration to solve long-standing distributed AI challenges, making AI more efficient, interactive, and privacy-preserving. The Institute will develop the key underlying technologies for distributed and networked intelligence to enable a host of future transformative applications such as intelligent transportation, remote healthcare, distributed robotics, and smart aerospace. It is a national priority to educate students, professionals, and practitioners in AI and networks, and substantially grow and diversify the workforce. The Institute will develop novel, efficient, and modular ways of creating and delivering educational content and curricula at scale, and to spearhead a program that helps build a large diverse workforce in AI and networks spanning K-12 to university students and faculty.The focus of the AI Institute will be on edge networks, which will constitute the majority of the growth of future networks. This edge includes all devices connected through the radio as well as data centers and cloud computing systems that are not at the core of the Internet. A critical component of the Institute is to shorten the time-scale of interactions between Foundations and use case research across multiple disciplines. This will result in a virtuous cycle that will have a cascading impact dramatically accelerating the time it takes from research to implementation and technology transfer. The research tasks will be enhanced and fleshed out by exploring three wireless edge use cases in depth: (1) Ubiquitous Sensing/Networking; (ii) Human-Machine Mobility and (iii) Programmable/virtualized 6G networks. These use cases are important in their own right and connect the key research thrusts and their validation to specific experimental platforms. The Institute will work with its industry and DoD partners to facilitate translation and adoption.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.